People often assume that personal style is a rigid concept, set and as unchangeable as our blood type. Really, however, taste—as in, truly personal style—is fluid. It’s determined by the ever-shifting sands of our emotions, circumstances, and confidence levels.
Just ask Pamela Anderson who is, at 58, in the midst of her most powerful style moment to date. In recent years, she’s embraced a subtler interpretation of the Old Hollywood bombshell archetype while also announcing herself as a fashion-loving art woman and barefoot-and-barefaced eco-queen.
Publicly, the shift really started to happen around September 2023 when she attended the Paris Fashion Week shows of The Row, Isabel Marant, Victoria Beckham, and Vivienne Westwood (a brand with which she has enjoyed a long-term relationship). The headline? She wasn’t wearing any makeup—something she then continued to do while on a press tour for her lauded role in Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl. Awards season was no different—the champagne Oscar de la Renta dress she wore to The Gotham Awards being a particular highlight.
Anderson is a woman who was, for so many years, chronically underestimated, seen as little more than a sex symbol. But if you’d bothered to look closely, you’d know she was always a more than that. Even in her pin-up pomp Anderson also always had a good sense of humor, which she’d often express through clothes. (Remember the gigantic fluffy pink hat she wore to the 1999 VMAs? Truly iconic).
Now on the press tour for The Naked Gun, Anderson is working with the stylist Bailey Moon. If the Version 1 make-up free Pammy skewed classic, the new-new look has been emboldened with touches of oddity, through gently amplified silhouettes and subtly tongue-in-cheek accessories like a pillbox hat, transparent gloves, white stockings, or mid-century sunglass shapes. These looks toy with, and ultimately reframe, the traditional design language of a pin-up: be it the immaculately cut midnight Thom Browne gown, a Danielle Frankel emerald ensemble, or an ice-blue off-the-shoulder Gabriela Hearst dress. Most of her jewelry has also been Pandora; she is an ambassador for the sustainably-minded Danish brand and it’s a meaningful collaboration that speaks to her eco-work.
Other looks to note? A polka dot midi dress from Haider Ackerman’s Tom Ford, a caped Ferragamo little black dress with a deep V-cut at the back, and an archival Marc Jacobs-era Louis Vuitton lace cocktail dress. There’s a glamour, levity, and joy with which she wears each outfit that can only come from the confidence of possessing both style and substance. It’s the look of a woman operating at the peak of her powers, living now, and not trying to reclaim the past or become someone she is not.
Anderson wrote in a recent edition of her Substack, The Open Journal: “So much of what I’ve lived…what I’ve created—began as a feeling. A shimmer of something just beyond reach…not quite real, but not only imaginary either. It lives in the moments when no one’s watching and nothing makes sense yet—but you keep going anyway…searching…”
That is how great personal style begins: as a feeling—not a formula.
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